In this podcast, Enric Corbera shows us how legacy programs manifest themselves. These programs are not only developed in our childhood: they also arise from the experiences of our ancestors and are transmitted from generation to generation.
What information do we inherit from the family? In this video, Enric Corbera answers several questions related to the .
In the realm of biology, and they defined the 19th century through evolution and genetics. In the 20th century, and with the discovery of the DNA sequence, posited a functional understanding of how genetics and evolution interact. In this century, the XXI, the deconstruction of these dogmas is proposed to reconstruct them in a much more varied, complex and human way. Epigenetic investigations reveal data capable of rewriting the understanding of genetics, disease and heredity.
She is a PhD in Virology from the University of Edinburgh and is a Professor at Imperial College London. In parallel, she is Director of Science of Epigenetics at a biotech company in the UK. In her book, she defines epigenetics as “the set of modifications to our genetic material that changes the way our genes are turned on and off, without altering the genes themselves.”
That is to say, epigenetics happen “when a change in the environment has biological consequences that outlast the event that generated the change”.
In the book he describes an example that perfectly illustrates the mechanism. Dr. Carey focuses on a specific episode in history: almost at the end of the Second World War, the Normandy landings had already taken place, but the Nazi army continued to occupy a large part of the Netherlands. At that time, the level of famine was already important. In addition, the last reprisals by the Germans consisted of seizing all food transports. This situation worsened between November 1944 and mid-1945 and is known as the Dutch Famine. As if that were not enough, it was aggravated by extremely cold weather conditions in Western Europe. People ate grass and tulip bulbs. Thousands of people died.
The survivors were a well-defined group and all of them had experienced a very specific period of malnutrition.. Excellent Dutch record keeping has allowed the long-term effects of the famine to be tracked and the results have been astounding. One of the first aspects that was studied was the effect of famine on the birth weight of children who had been in the womb during that period of time. “If the mother had been well nourished around the time of conception and malnourished only during the last few months of her pregnancy, her baby was likely to be born with a low birth weight. If, on the contrary, there was malnutrition during the first three months of pregnancy, it was likely that the baby would have an abnormal weight..
So far the registry offers logical data. But epidemiologists were able to study these groups of babies for decades and They found that babies who were born small stayed that way all their lives: they could eat whatever they wanted and never gained weight. “their bodies never recovered from the early days of malnutrition”. However, children who had been malnourished only at the beginning of the had rates of higher than normal and other additives. Despite the fact that at birth they appeared perfectly healthy.
“Events that take place in the first three months of life can affect an individual for the rest of his life.
And even more: “Some of these effects seem to be present in the children of this group, that is, in the grandchildren of malnourished women during the first three months of their pregnancy.”. This raises the question of how the effects carried over to subsequent generations.
At ® we know that the experiences lived by our people can be expressed in our biology in the present, and that the emotions experienced during the first months of a person’s life influence their way of perceiving and living in the world. Epigenetics offers a scientific argument for the search for the traumatic experiences of our ancestors. We are the expression of our genes -genome-, but above all, we are the expression of our epigenome. Somehow, our lives are the expression of these programs; and the sooner we become aware of it, the sooner we will have the ones that will allow us to be owners of .
“If genes were single words, epigenetics represents the periods, commas and other spelling marks that allow us to understand a sequence.”
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